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SiteGround|Last 16 Month Performance Review 2020

SiteGround is a popular shared hosting provider that offers its users multiple different hosting options.

These include WordPress hosting, cloud hosting and even dedicated servers.

We’ve been monitoring SiteGround’s cheapest “Startup” shared plan for over two years now.

We paid for a shared hosting account, set up a live test site, and have been closely tracking their performance with a third-party tool to provide this unbiased, transparent review.

Overall, SiteGround hosting ranks near the top of all web hosting companies for both uptime (99.99%) and speed (681ms). Their customer support team is knowledgeable, fast, and friendly. All plans come with a CDN, SSL certificate, and email accounts.

Pros of Using SiteGround Hosting

SiteGround starts strong with 99.99% uptime, above-average speeds, and tons of extra features that are perfect for both beginners and power users.

1. Good Performance – 99.99% Uptime in Last 24 Months

All of our hosting reviews are based on at least 24-months of actual statistics and raw data.

SiteGround’s uptime performance has been nearly perfect over that time. Their 99.99% average puts them among the most reliable hosts we’ve reviewed (31 and counting).

Reliable uptime like this keeps website visitors happy. But more importantly, it means your site is almost guaranteed to be working around the clock so you won’t miss out when your customers want to make a purchase, either.

2. Above-Average Load Time (681ms)

Site speed is easily the second most critical factor when choosing a host.

For starters, research by Google shows that 53% of people will leave if your pages don’t load within three seconds.

Furthermore, you can’t do much to fix a slow host. You might be able to compress images to lighten their weight. You might be able to load them through a CDN to take some pressure off your server. But once a slow host? Always a slow host.

Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about that with SiteGround. It’s above-average loading time of 681ms isn’t the fastest we’ve seen, but it does place SiteGround near the top 10 at speed.

There aren’t any long and boring walkthroughs, either. You simply generate a token from inside your SiteGround hosting account and the plugin will quickly help do the heavy lifting.

Yes, it still requires you to do a little work. But the good news is that you can migrate as many websites as you want with this option. (In comparison, some hosts that offer “free migrations” cap it after only a few, forcing you to pay after a certain point.)

If you’d rather have some professional, hands-on help, SiteGround will throw in the free service on their higher-tier plans (GrowBig and up).

If you exceed the limits on each plan, they charge a nominal fee of $30 for each additional site.

5. Free SSL Certificate and Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Google Chrome has started actively warning people if the site they’re trying to reach doesn’t have an SSL certificate set up.

SSL helps to protect any information sent back and forth between the user’s device and the website, including personal details like IP addresses or credit card numbers. If left unsecured, hackers and others could easily intercept this information. So Chrome is looking out for web users’ best interest here.

In other words, that basically makes SSL certificates a requirement on all websites today. And thankfully, SiteGround throws these in for free on all plans.

The other bit of good news comes in the form of a free Cloudflare CDN (Content Delivery Network). CDN stores large files, like images, on many servers in different locations around the globe. This helps to make sure that the files are stored as close as possible to site visitors, making them faster to access.

SiteGround has servers spread out over three continents, which helps to keep loading times fast and provide a good customer experience.

6. Beginner-to-Advanced Features Available

SiteGround has a little something for everyone.

Beginners and bloggers will like that you can install popular website builders like Weebly in just a few clicks. Weebly features a simple drag-and-drop editor so you can take full control over the look and feel of your site (without having to dive into code).

Other than Weebly, SiteGround also has deep integrations with WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. Each of these apps can be installed quickly and painlessly. No need for a developer to help you out.

However, if you already are a developer, you’re in luck, too.

You’ll get Git pre-installed on bigger plans, along with SSH, WP-CLI, SFTP, and phpMyAdmin. They have multiple PHP versions at your disposal. Multi-level caching is available. And you can also get access to staging environments for sites to prep or test before pushing new features into production.

SiteGround also helps out with security, using a proprietary, AI-bot prevention tool that tries to snuff out new attacks before they hit. Their data reports that anywhere from 500,000 to two million brute-force attempts are blocked on their servers each hour.

So you’re not left alone to deal with these headaches, either.

7. 99.99% Uptime Guarantee

Remember that solid 99.99% uptime average? Well, there’s a reason SiteGround doesn’t falter here – it would cost them a lot of money.

Often, when you dig into a web host’s terms of service, there’s only bad news buried in the fine print.

SiteGround surprised us in a good way. Under their Service Level Agreement, they guarantee “network uptime of 99.9% on an annual basis.” If they ever dip below that threshold, you will get compensated with free months of hosting.

SiteGround uptime guarantee

Now, there are a few conditions to how the uptime is calculated. Any scheduled or emergency maintenance issues are exempt. If something you do causes the downtime (such as exceed resources, install applications that don’t work, or violate terms), then SiteGround does not take responsibility. Any major external attacks on their systems could sidestep this policy, too.

8. 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee

SiteGround features a full 30-day money-back guarantee on all shared hosting plans. In comparison, their cloud, VPS, and dedicated hosting plans only come with a 15-day refund.

Like many other hosts, domain name fees and any other “extras” are usually not refunded. And this refund policy only applies to brand new customers. So you can’t get refunds on renewal plans.

Cons of Using SiteGround Hosting

SiteGround impressed us with near-flawless uptime and their guarantee of free service if uptime dips below 99.99%. Their loading speeds are quite good, even if they’re not the fastest out there. Also, SiteGround offers a variety of apps to make both beginners and advanced users happy.

However, there are a few drawbacks to consider before signing up. So here are some of the bigger issues we ran into during our hands-on test.

1. Higher Renewal Rates

SiteGround’s cheapest plan, StartUp, features a low $3.95/month advertised price on their website.

This deal looks a little too good to be true because it is. Almost every web host we’ve reviewed to date uses the same trick. They catch your attention with a low introductory rate, only to double (or even triple) the price when it’s time to renew.

For example, that $3.95/month rate jumps up to $11.95 when you renew. SiteGround’s other plans hike up to $19.95 and $34.95/month respectively.

The best solution to this is to lock-in the longest term possible (36 months on SiteGround) to take advantage of that low rate for as long as you can.

2. $14.95 “Setup Fee” for Monthly Billing

Not many shared web hosts let you buy only a month to begin. They often try to get you to sign up for at least a few months or a year.

The good news is that with SiteGround you can sign up for a single month. The bad news is that they charge you a “Setup Fee” for these plans.

Under current pricing, that means you’re paying the introductory rate $3.95/month plus a one-time setup fee of $ 14.95.

The problem, as described in the last section, is that after that first month your plan will be renewed at a higher rate.

So you might initially think you’re getting a great deal, trying out their service for only a few bucks. But the reality is that you will be penalized twice (once through the setup fee and again through the renewal rate).

Don’t bother with this one month plan, because you’ll only end up paying more in the long run.

3. Limited “Cheap” Plan

SiteGround’s pricing on their lowest plan is comparable to the competition so it seems like a good deal when you first look at it.

However, the plan features don’t line up exactly.

For example, you get one website and only 10 GB of web space to handle around 10,000 monthly visits. This plan also features unlimited traffic (or unmetered bandwidth). However, if your site is getting anywhere close to those limits, performance is going to suffer.

That means it’s good for smaller sites who might not hit those thresholds for a while. But if your site starts becoming bigger, you’ll probably have to upgrade and pay more for increased resources.

4. No Free Domain Name

Most web hosts throw in ‘freebies’ to attract new customers.

That often includes the low introductory rate and additional services like email or migrations.

A free domain name for the first year is almost always on that list, too.

SiteGround, unfortunately, doesn’t do that. If you don’t already have a domain name, they’ll charge you for one from day one, starting at $15.95/year.

SiteGround Pricing, Hosting Plans & Quick Facts

SiteGround has three shared hosting tiers. Here are the costs and highlights:

The StartUp plan: This plan costs $3.95 per month, can host one website and is good for newbies who are just starting with a website. It can handle up to 10,000 unique visits per month, with unlimited bandwidth, 24/7 client support, free Cloudflare CDN, free Let’s Encrypt SSL, unlimited emails & DBs, free daily backups, and more.

The GrowBig plan: This plan costs $5.95 per month and can host multiple websites. In addition to what the StartUp plan has, you also get a free SSL Wildcard for 1 year, 30 backup copies and free restore, all 3-levels of the SuperCacher, which aids loading time tremendously, and staging environments for both WordPress and Joomla.

Their GoGeek plan: This plan costs $11.95 per month and can host unlimited websites. It has 30GB of space for up to 100,000 visits per month. It has all features of the other two plans plus priority support, PCI compliance and one-click Git repo creation.

Payment Methods: Credit Card (there are other options available through chat)

Hidden Fees and Clauses: They charge a $14.95 setup fee if you pay for their shared hosting plans monthly instead of annually. Renewal rates are also higher. And you have to pay for a domain name (no freebie).

Upsells: A few… but nothing too bad.

Account Activation: Quick account activation.

Control Panel and Dashboard: cPanel

Installation of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): Quick and easy install of popular apps and CMSs using Softaculous.

Do We Recommend SiteGround?

Yes, we do.

SiteGround has delivered solid uptime for a few years now. And their uptime guarantee makes sure that you’ll probably never have any major downtime issues.

Their site speed is pretty good, too. That’s thanks in part to their servers spread out over three continents and free Cloudflare CDN account. They also give you free SSL on all plans, too.

Pricing is good if you take advantage of the longest term possible. Otherwise, you’ll end up hitting those high renewal rates sooner. Bring your own domain, too, to escape another fee.

P.S. Have you used SiteGround before? Please consider leaving a review below — good or bad — doesn’t really matter as long it’s helpful to our visitors. Thanks for your support.

We only accept user-reviews that give value to our visitors. Not all reviews will be published. If you wish your review to be approved, we recommend you to write valid, unique and helpful reviews – either positive or negative. Thanks for your support!

Important: Web host companies cannot pay to delete or change the reviews. But we provide them an opportunity to answer or comment on any review, to keep the process honest and fair for both sides.

I’ve only been with SiteGround for about a month or two, and I have already opened 20+ support tickets. Nothing has worked right the first time, and I constantly have to get someone to fix some issue on their side. I will say that they always seem to resolve the issue within 30 minutes, however it is very off-putting that nothing works the way it should. I have the managed Wordpress hosting.

Here’s a list of issues I’ve experienced so far:1. They say they will transfer your website for free, but in the fine print they limit that to only 1 website. No emails, no subdomains, no settings, nothing. Just the files and 1 database. I had to manually create the 20+ email accounts I had setup on the new host and spend multiple hours moving the emails over. Took me 3+ days to move everything over to SiteGround. I thought it was going to be a simple move where they could export my Cpanel and move all my settings over, but nope, I had to do 90% of the work.2. The number 1 factor I chose SiteGround was because of their focus on load times. Upon switching, my site began to load slower even while using their SG Optimizer WordPress plugin. I enabled “enable https” in the plugin and it completely corrupted my database. Luckily, I had a backup to revert to.2.1 To this day I am still unable to turn on Memcached. Enabling this completely brings down my website. I have opened multiple support tickets on this and all they do is try it on my site, it doesn’t work, so they say “it’s probably a plugin on your site causing the issue”. Also with this, when I opened a ticket, they turned on Memcached on my LIVE site to test this, which completely brought down my website for 30+ minutes. They could have at least made a staging site of my website and tested on there. They are making it MY RESPONSIBILITY to find out why THEIR memcaching doesn’t work, instead of taking it into their own hands and figuring out a root cause.3. Cronjobs. This one is minor but SiteGround does not support CronTabs, which means there is no way (that I have found) to have a script that automatically creates its own cron job. I had to completely rethink and re-code a script to get it to work on siteground4. I am unable to create staging sites of my website. I made one one day and it seems to have completed but I was unable to get to the URL to view the staging site. I tried to delete that staging site and it kept throwing errors. Contacted support and they tried to make the staging site on their end and was unsuccessful. Another issue that had to be escalated and just doesn’t work right.

How is it possible that within 2 months I can have THIS MANY ISSUES with no offer of any sort of discount or anything for all the issues I have been having?

Like stated before, the only good thing I’ve seen about SiteGround so far is the fairly fast responses to any support tickets or chats that I open.

Adam5 — July 17, 2019

Great Experience

The review is spot on – I’ve been with Siteground since 2017, and found it a huge improvement over my 16 years on Bluehost. I’ve appreciated the personal support, the speed, and the ease of installing SSL certificates. For me, it’s been a great host.

yvonne van Leeuwen5

good service, recommend

I’ve been with Siteground for a few years now and have found their offering to be fast and efficient. Their customer service is generally very good, and you don’t have to wait long at all for a response. I think an update of their own website would be a good idea though!! It’s hard to find the support link to start a chat (i’ve learned how to get through to it now, but it took a while and it’s very well hidden). And the site is very text heavy, could do with a UI workover! I’ve dealt with other hosts before and find Siteground to be supportive. Thanks

Dimitrios Petropoulos1 — June 6, 2019

Their servers are causing serious issues to my sites

I have faced several issues with siteground’s server, with the most important the latest 400 bad request error. Their “technical” staff in support request has no idea of an nginx architecture. Their initial response was that cloudflare causes the error, so I deactivated the cloudflare in order to prove to them that this is impossible! Then they said that it is a plugin conflict, so I deactivated all the plugins in order to prove that this is not the problem too (my site was working 2 years without any issue in another hosting provider, with the same plugins).

They did not follow the simplest and more accurate way to solve the issue, which is to see the error logs!

I sent them some instructions to switch the server’s logs to info, because they insisted that the error logs are empty. This is because nginx writes the 400 errors at info level.

My site is still not working and waiting from these unprofessional guys to be educated and solve my issue.

julia5 — June 3, 2019

amazing

Okay so i’ve had wix, and a google domain, and just recently switched to siteground and wordpress. AMAZING. no idea how to point my google domain to siteground so i called siteground at around midnight and they sent me a tutorial and i got halfway and then go confused and called them back twice and now i figured it out and am so happy!!! WONDERFUL customer service!!!! highly recommend!

Ana1 — May 29, 2019

SiteGround deleted my WordPress website permanently

It was my first time using their hosting service. I hosted for 2 years , then I moved out of state and changed my phone number. My email address was the same. I was late in a renewal payment bc I also changed banks and forgot to update auto renewal payment. I received no notification that unless paid they would permanently delete my website, all files unrecoverable. I was told that since it was past 30 days, (45) on a quarter renewal, I was out of luck! I am devastated to say the least. I paid $6000 for the site plus fees not to mention the work , ads, images etc etc . My whole livelihood disappeared with no recourse. Bc of $75? No apology. Just “ that’s the policy “. I accept responsibility for not updating the payment but feel they should be more clear and let customers know something so dire is about to happen. Believe me if I’d received an email saying they were deleting all content I would have paid it. Holding onto a customers content until you speak to them (who has been a great client for 2 years no issues) would also be a good idea.

SITEGROUND REVIEW RESPONSE

Hi Ana,

We are truly sorry that an unfortunate combination of circumstances after your relocation led to the loss of your website. We would gladly have assisted you with the site restoration if there was an additional backup of the website stored at a different location. When you contacted us about a copy of the website too much time has passed since your hosting account has expired and we no longer kept the files. We kindly want to remind you that as per our terms of service in the absence of payment we suspend services. Even though we try to keep backups of clients’ accounts longer than the 7 days period in our terms, we cannot store them indefinitely without receiving a payment.

With regard to notifications, we send all the communication to the administrative email of the account and as it turns out you have worked with a web developer on managing the site, so we are not sure why the messages have not reached you. We start reminding you about the upcoming expiration of your services more than a month in advance and we also attempt to auto-renew them with the goal to prevent downtime for your website.

Regards,SiteGround Team

Karen O.1 — May 24, 2019

not as impressed as I hoped

I was impressed by the website transfer at first, but everything has gone sour since.

They didn’t put on the ssl. And then they did it wrong. At one point my website was completely down and they were telling me that people just had to go in securely (they couldn’t just type the domain name). And when I call they are curt at best. That seems to be fixed.

My email didn’t work at all. When I called, they told me all the things that I had to do. They had told me the switch would be easy. It has not been. My email still isn’t working properly. They are doing some sort of filtering so I don’t receive messages from cell phones. I can’t figure out how to fix it and they either don’t know, can’t do it, or won’t do it (I need to do it).

I will update if they finally fix it.

SITEGROUND REVIEW RESPONSE

Hi Karen,

We were sorry to hear that your experience with our service after the transfer of your website has not been very good. We would like to review the issues you have reported and try to resolve them permanently so that everything is working normally for you. We were not able to locate your account to check the details further, so please send us the ticket and chat IDs of the communication with our team at reviews at siteground dot com. We will escalate your case to our Customer Support Supervisors and they will do their best to assist you.

Regards,SiteGround Team

Dennis1 — May 2, 2019

They don’t care about you, but your $$$ they do

To make this story short – we hosted our non-profit website for quite sometime now with SG (8 years?). It started off with zero nonsense approach and a few times when site was hacked into or any issues – they were quick to resolve.

This year, the renewal e-mail came through and we did not even bother to read it – as we were used to auto-pilot mode with SG. Than someone, finally, took a look at this renewal e-mail and instead of “typical” 160 or so dollars per year – the bill was for 239 (!!!).

The shock and dismay was our reality! And still is today. We are shopping around reading reviews on other companies trying to locate a decent host that will not raise their prices on long-term clients such as our non-profit…

The promo pricing is great. But we need to know what type of commitment providers have to their clients. In case of SG – they have ZERO commitment to their actual “backbone” of clients who made them so successful.

The lady on the chat was copying and pasting a text justifying their ridiculous price increase with all the glory of the offering https, spam filtering, etc… As far as we are aware – these are industry standards, nothing too exciting… That “generous” 10% off offered to us via chat was nothing short of insult…

So, at this point – we have a couple of weeks to find a suitable host and move our “little” service elsewhere. We typically spent (with all domains, masking, renewals) about 230 dollars a year in total. SG wants more, but we are not a business to be able to spend to suit their increasing appetite…

SITEGROUND REVIEW RESPONSE

Hi Dennis,

Thank you for trusting us with your website for 8 years this means you have been satisfied with our services and we are grateful you have been such a loyal client. We understand that as non-profit your organization is running on tight budget and it may be hard to accommodate additional costs.

We want to assure you that the adjustment in our prices implemented last year came after careful consideration and our goal was to continue to deliver the same quality hosting that you have received from us in the past 8 years. As our representative explained to you we have added a lot of enhancements to the service in the past 10 years without charging additionally our clients for them and absorbed all the cost for the integration of the latest technologies for speed and security in our services. Regarding SSLs we would like to remind you that we were one of the first host to make them available for free to our customers back in 2016 and we also developed an interface to make their management easier. To give you a few more recent examples of improvements we included in our hosting packages at no extra charge, since March we have Quic on our servers, the newest protocol that makes possible for websites to load fast even with a slow internet connection. In addition, for our 15th anniversary we have added backup and staging features to our lower shared hosting plans and improved the support for GoGeek and higher plans.

Regards,SiteGround Team

Anonymous1 — April 17, 2019

Buyer Beware

If you need technical help or support, they’re team is not the best available. Hosted our website with them for a bit. Any time I had issues where site went down was because of changes their team made. Also any maintenance scheduled on your account is never communicated. So, if you want to make updates to your site, you better just hope it’s not during a time they’ve scheduled internally an update to your server. And due to it being a software service, they’re not liable for downtime. But when you’re generating over 50K visits to your website each month, even a minute of your website being down could cost you quite a few leads (and revenue). If you’re looking for a service that is transparent, has knowledgeable customer service reps – look elsewhere.

SITEGROUND REVIEW RESPONSE

Dear customer,

We were sorry to hear about your experience. We understand how important is uptime for an online business and we would like to check the issues you have encountered and investigate the reasons that led to downtime for your site, if you provide us with details to locate your account. Unfortunately in your review there is not enough information to validate the concerns you have raised with using our services. Could you send us your domain, and include chat and ticket IDs where you reported the problem at reviews at siteground dot com, so we can check further the issues?

With regard to scheduled maintenance, it is not correct that we do not provide information about this in advance. We have a procedure that includes a step to put a notice to all customers that will be affected when there is planned maintenance work for their server(s). In the User Area we add a notification several days ahead of the expected work that is visible on the index page upon login and when clicking on it the client can see the full details for the upcoming maintenance. Thus, we aim to enable our customers to schedule their work to match the situation. Our clients can follow updates our technicians place on the status of the maintenance and monitor when it is completed.

We kindly want to remind you that you can find our policy regarding downtime in our service level agreement and in case you feel we have not met our obligations, our team can check that as well. We take customer feedback seriously, especially in cases when a client request has not been handled well, and we aim to review them and clear any misunderstanding as well as to prevent the same situation from happening again.

Regards,SiteGround team

Michael L.1 — February 26, 2019

Siteground has SERIOUS issues.

First off, Siteground used to have stellar service. Amazing service. You could ask them to do things like activate an SSL certificate on a site and they would do it live for you on chat. About a year ago, they cut out all chat chat support for everything that was not a mission critical failure and turned everything into tickets instead. Even when you do have a website down issue, you’ll get put into chat but 80% of the time, you’ll get routed to customer service which has no idea what to do or routed to leave a message because “nobody is available”. Now when you open a ticket into support, and wait a day for answers, you’ll receive “owners manual” type answers to do it yourself. So if you were expecting legendary Siteground support, or paid another annual renewal thinking you’ll get that legendary service, you’ll be sorely disappointed – and in my case bait-and-switch.

Second, Siteground makes it extremely difficult to cancel or change services or execute refunds. When a Cloudflare renewal was coming up, I tried for hours searching for how to cancel the service, but was impossible so I waited until 2 weeks before the renewal date to address the issue. Surprisingly, they decided to charge me the full amount 1 month before the renewal date, and so I started a support ticket with them to get a refund. Support says they can’t refund because they already paid Cloudflare for it. That’s not how ANY SaaS company works. Now Cloudflare support says they couldn’t refund because support’s handled by Siteground. Eventually, I threatened pulling all services and filing chargebacks and they “disappeared” for a few minutes and came back and refunded me on a “one time exception” on some patronizing reason like “I’m so loyal”. What a bunch of crooks.

Third, Siteground randomly decided to miss backups in the last 7 days for no explainable reason and because of this, I lost 40+ hours of work and thousands of dollars. When I let them know, they opened a “ticket” with no ETA …. eventually they fixed it, but the bottom line was their incompetence screwed me over out of time and money. What the hell is wrong with this company? New ownership?

Don’t believe the hype – that was the past. There are better hosting companies out there. I am starting to have SERIOUS TRUST ISSUES with this company and you should too.

SITEGROUND REVIEW RESPONSE

Hello Michael,

We were sorry to hear about your recent experiences and would like to address them and clarify some details.

First, we have to point out that all 3 channels that we offer (phone, ticketing and chat) are available 24/7. In rare cases there might be a longer wait time over chat or phone, but we always make sure to contact the users if they leave a message. Customers can access them via the Support section in their client area. With the goal to provide faster and more efficient assistance, we ask our clients to first describe the exact issue they have and select the most relevant category, so we can point them to the most suitable channels to resolve their request. Please note that our AI system algorithm takes into account factors such as the nature of the issue, the current load of inquiries and many more, before it recommends 2 options of contact. The system is designed to refer you to channels with minimal wait time and the best-qualified support members for the specific case. From our records, we can see that we have assisted you with a wide range of questions in 30+ chat sessions – which seems to be your preferred contact option, while you have posted only 8 support requests in the last year via tickets for issues which were either not urgent or required deeper investigation (and even then, first reply usually comes in less than 15 minutes). In case you are not satisfied with a particular case, the suggested channel for assistance or the handling, we will be happy to review it. Please send us the details to feedback at SiteGround dot com.

In regard to renewal and refund policies – the information about them is available both on our website and via your client area. We also send multiple email notifications prior to the expiration date of a service to let users know we will attempt to renew it. There we write that to prevent downtime for our clients’ websites we have an auto-renewal system in place and try to process a payment before expiration, because in absence of a payment, we have to suspend the service. Through this system we want to give users enough time to take action and avoid downtime for their website, which often is related to their business or important personal causes. In case a user does not want to renew, they can take the necessary precautions from the billing section of the client area.

The CloudFlare service you refer to was renewed 15 days before it was due to expire (not 1 month as mentioned), and this happened almost 3 months after your hosting account was auto-renewed by the same system, following the same chain of email notifications described previously. We can see that the refund for the CloudFlare service has been issued as per your request and the money is returned to you. Our representative has explained that he has made an exception in your case because as stated in our refund policy services from third-party providers like Cloudflare are not eligible for a refund. Lastly, we would like to apologize for the inconvenience with the missing backups in your account. After contacting us yesterday our admins investigated the case and were able to successfully re-initiation the backup creation in your account. In addition, a senior technical team has addressed this issue in ticket 3038773 and provided more details.

Regards,SiteGround team

Marcos5 — February 16, 2019

Best Hosting Company Beyond Doubt

I have been with siteground for a number of years now after trying out a number of other providers. I can honestly say that none have come even close to the service and performance that Siteground offer. I also think that many people write negative views when they have encountered issues with a provider, and turn to the web to vent their rage. Yet many happy customers tend not to post reviews about their good experiences with a provider, which unfortunately leads to a lop sided misrepresentation against the better companies out there, including Siteground.

In my experience, the service I have received, including support, has been nothing short of excellent.

Juan2 — January 15, 2019

I lost my site with SiteGround

I moved after 10 years with Media Temple to Site Ground thinking that -from what I read- their service was better. In order to have always the latest version, I installed Wordpress through their control panel. It is version with auto updater.I had all the security plugins installed and purchased SG Site Scanner, a script that “tells you if your site is clean”.

After a couple of months, I tried yesterday to update my posts just to realize my website was hacked. I sent a ticket through their 1990 looking support site. Long story short, I am about to lose 10 years with no support at all from them. Yes, they have a backup to restore the site, but only from 30 days back. Someone hacked my site on January 1st and it’s been 45 days since. So no backup, no log in through wp-admin… my work is almost gone.

The support guys just sent me a list of “suspicious” files, saying “help yourself or buy the XYZ wordpress repair service from XXX”. I asked them to help me with backup before January 1st. Nothing. So my traffic is 0 right now, penalized by Google… I’m not very happy with all this, as you might imagine. I included an image to prove that currently I am a SG customer.

I’m currently trying to get my files and site back. So I think that most of the comments I’ve read were either false or paid. I think SiteGround is not a serious business, not worthy paying for, unless you want to harm your reputation.

I’ll be moving to MediaTemple, WP Engine or BlueHost again or to a new hosting company with additional security. Different pricing, but… how much did I lose after 45 days without a site and SG “Scanner” sending emails saying: Your safe is CLEAN?

Guys at Site Ground, as I’ve seen you reply to some customers saying “we cannot find your website” implying it is a fake review, please take a look at the ticket number #3024118. I am an active customer.

My final advice: Do not trust this company. Remember, they offer a cheap deal the first year, and then the price goes up up up, and after that, you might lose your site with awful customer support.

SITEGROUND REVIEW RESPONSE

Hi Juan,

We carefully reviewed your case and we would like to add some clarifications regarding our security policies. Please note that we do our best to keep your account safe on server level applying measures to prevent remote code inclusion and variable poisoning, utilising a sophisticated IDS / IPS systems which block malicious bots and attackers, and we have a server environment that ensures your website is isolated from the rest of the sites on the server. Yet, prevention of hacker attacks also requires regular maintenance on the website level, not only keeping your application and plugins up-to-date, but also using strong passwords and antivirus systems on your local computer. All these activities are managed by the site owner.

With regard to the SG scanner service we would like to clarify that it is not a comprehensive tool that protects your website as it only scans the publicly available links of your website. In case the website’s system files are compromised, which in 99.9% of times is caused by outdated application and/or any of it’s components, this results in having a blank page and the scanner doesn’t find any links on the website to actually crawl that is why it did not mark any malicious activity on the website. In our tutorials and sales pages we clearly describe how this service works and we aim to be clear about its functionality.

Cleaning your website from malicious code is outside the scope of our services and we have given you the list of the compromised files and explained that you can remove them on your own or consider using the service from our partners from Sucuri to take care of it for you.

Regarding backups, it is correct that with the plan you have with us we keep copies of your website from the past 30 days and you can use them to restore your website. Unfortunately, we do not store your data past this period therefore we could not provide you with a copy of the website dated 45 days earlier. As an alternative our tech team has offered to help restore your website If have a separate backup of the site in an alternate location. Also we have suggested to try to link your site’s database to a clean instance of WordPress and leave you to re-configure the themes and plugins and put it back online. We have not heard back from you about these options and we remain available to assist you further.

Regards,SiteGround team

David Cragg5 — January 11, 2019

BEST Hosting Support

I am an SEO professional with 15 clients. A new client insisted on using SiteGround to host their site while all my other clients use Godaddy. I was very reluctant because support is SOOOO important. I found that my reservations were unfounded. Tonight, SiteGround provided the best support that I have had in years. It took two calls but I really don’t care. A real tough problem was resolved. I AM VERY HAPPY and will start to recommend SiteGround to new clients.

Ezaz Shaikh5 — December 25, 2018

SiteGround Genuine Review

I believe SiteGround is the worth web hosting service among all the present hosting companies. Though BlueHost is popular on the internet, but it cannot beat Siteground for sure, if we compare all the features and rate.

Brandon C1 — December 10, 2018

Raving Angry!

This EXPENSIVE hosting service deleted my site backups after a minor payment issue. Im angry beyond belief at these fools. WHY WOULD YOU NOT SAVE WEBSITE BACKUPS? Im talking about next to nothing in terms of space…

I had over $1,000 easily put into my websites, plus virtual coder cost and lots of time spent on them (maybe 100 hours+).

Should of went with HostGator or someone without such idiotic policies. If their support is so good, then why didnt they reach out to me-a longtime client, by phone? Im just thankful I didnt build out more on their terrible service. Ill be taking my money elsewhere and I hope you do the same. Shame on anyone who recommends these fools and their services.

SITEGROUND REVIEW RESPONSE

Hi Brandon,

We would like to review the reason for losing your backups and address your case, but unfortunately we were not able to identify your account. Please note for us any feedback from customers is important and we aim to check how we can improve client experience. It will help us if you send us your domain and client email to reviews at siteground dot com so we can examine the communication with regard to using the backup service included in your plan.

We understand losing data is frustrating, yet we would like to point out that our terms of service have a dedicated section on backup services. There we list our obligations and we explicitly state that you agree to also keep independent backup copies of your content in addition to the backups we maintain. That clause is intended to prevent situations of data loss and to inform you that our backups should not be used as sole copy of your files.

Regards,SiteGround Team

Jeff M1 — November 28, 2018

paused my hosting

They claimed that my site was hacked and after that they suggested that i change my password to cpanel. I forgot to do it so 2 month later i wake up to see all the sites on that hosting plan are down. No error logs, no emails of any kind. I contacted their support so they told me they shut down my account since i didnt take their advice to change my password.

My sites were down most of the night and few hours in the morning while i was waiting for them to respond.

They couldnt have emailed me a warning. They could have reset my password and let me know that it was reset on my behalf. They could have done many things but to take my sites down was the worst choice they made.

This is beyond irresponsible behavior!

SITEGROUND REVIEW RESPONSE

Hi Jeff,

We were sorry to hear you are not satisfied with our service. We were not able to locate your account to check in more details the reason for suspending the access to your website. We would like to review the handling of your case and we will be grateful if you send us your account information (domain, client email) to reviews at siteground dot com.

As part of our security policy when a hacker activity is detected on a client’s account we suspend access to the compromised files to stop it from spreading and affecting other users. To prevent further unauthorised access to your account we recommend that you change the cPanel password as well. It appears that we have not received a confirmation you have completed the password update. That is why we have not lifted the suspension as we needed to verify all security instructions were applied. Please note it is our policy to get your permission for any changes we make on your behalf related to login data and files, and we couldn’t proceed with the update without your approval.

We apologise for the inconvenience caused by the downtime of your website, but as we have a responsibility to protect all of our clients on the same server we follow our procedure strictly to keep them secure.

Regards,Siteground Team

Sherry Harris5 — November 22, 2018

Love Their Customer Service

I have been with SiteGround for about a year. Their service is top-notch.

Everyone there goes over and above to help you solve your issues immediately. I normally use their chatbox to talk with them. I have used email maybe twice and even then I received detailed responses from them regarding my questions.

I highly recommend SiteGround primarily because I am not technical and don’t have a desire to learn most of the behind-the-scenes stuff. They always talk to me in a language that I can understand, which I love. I haven’t had one bad interaction with them and I can’t say that about other hosting companies I have had before.

Julius5 — October 24, 2018

Siteground experience

I started with a single domain a year ago. Setup was easy (GrowBig account). I’ve been watching since then and am extremely pleased with it. So recently I transferred my other domain from Godaddy. Godaddy gave some problems with the transfer but after chatting with support all was fixed in super fast, super convenient way. Later after verification of transfer was received I had some more questions and contacted support chat again. Again, very helpful and everything I had questions about was explained. So, my opinion of siteground is that it is great. Recommended.

Allison W.5 — October 21, 2018

Blowing My Mind

Long story short, I came from hosting with GoDaddy. Anyone who has been with them before knows that they lack in every department possible. From customer support to user-friendliness. I can say I waited over an hour for a representative on a web-chat to resolve billing issues. They are also mega expensive with their services and I feel as though my services were slow and lack-luster. I switched to SiteGround after a friend raved about it. And I can see why. I think I waited about 30 seconds for someone to help me, and they actually knew what they were talking about. I mean, your lucky if GoDaddy representatives can tell you what color the grass is. I am beyond impressed with what I had to what I have. I wish I would have gone here 3 years ago.

Kevin4 — October 4, 2018

Good but Expensive for the little guy

All in all, I’ve had very little problems with SiteGround on the whole. The renewal costs I found to be too high. Yes, I fell for the low-cost first-year model. But with renewal over £200 for 12 months of ‘Great Support and Even Greater Hosting’… – There are plenty of other choices which claim to also offer ‘Great Support’.

Support response times are very swift and are usually also very helpful, but occasionally you do get someone who hasn’t read or understood the ticket. So things can drag out a little, but you get there in the end.

Be careful with additional services, and be sure to know what is included with the package level you purchase before you purchase. SiteGround has a partnership with Sucuri which they default to if there is money to be made from recovery assistance.

If you have the budget, go for it, if not, give those hosts you skipped on the way to SiteGround another look. There are some gems hidden amongst the dirt.